Samsung is trying to make a GPU for years and enter this already crowded GPU IP market. Qualcomm uses Adreno, Nvidia uses Geforce and wants to license it to others. Apple uses PowerVR while Mediatek uses ARM owed Mali graphics for newer processors while using PowerVR for some older parts. Intel is using PowerVR G6430 for its mobile processors such as Atom Z3580 Moorefield while AMD has its own graphics that it can use for future SoCs and APUs. Intel owns Intel HD graphics that dominates the integrated CPU market especially for notebooks.

Samsung currently uses Mali graphics but this might change. If its team is successful, it might come with its own graphics and jack them under the bonnet of its own Exynos processor by the next summer.

Samsung is trying to get into Nvidia space and the company doesn’t like it. Even if Samsung manages to make a successful GPU, the competition is hard. Even with years of trying Samsung is mostly using Exynos for its own tablets and some phones. Most Samsung high end phones use Qualcomm Snapdragons as these tend to have better LTE modems and are widely available.

According to the Korean ZDnet the company might talk about the GPU as early as February at the Solid Circuits Society (ISSCC) conference with the official announcement scheduled for summer 2015.

Microsoft announced DirectX 12 just a few days ago and for the first time Redmond's API is relevant beyond the PC space. Some DirectX 12 tech will end up in phones and of course Windows tablets.

Qualcomm likes the idea, along with Nvidia. Qualcomm published an blog post on the potential impact of DirectX 12 on the mobile industry and the takeaway is very positive indeed.

DirectX 12 equals less overhead, more battery life

Qualcomm says it has worked closely with Microsoft to optimise "Windows mobile operating systems" and make the most of Adreno graphics. The chipmaker points out that current Snapdragon chipsets already support DirectX 9.3 and DirectX 11. However, the transition to DirectX 12 will make a huge difference.

"DirectX 12 will turbocharge gaming on Snapdragon enabled devices in many ways. Just a few years ago, our Snapdragon processors featured one CPU core, now most Snapdragon processors offer four. The new libraries and API’s in DirectX 12 make more efficient use of these multiple cores to deliver better performance," Qualcomm said.

DirectX 12 will also allow the GPU to be used more efficiently, delivering superior performance per watt.

"That means games will look better and deliver longer gameplay longer on a single charge," Qualcomm's gaming and graphics director Jim Merrick added.

What about eye candy?

Any improvement in efficiency also tends to have a positive effect on overall quality. Developers can get more out of existing hardware, they will have more resources at their disposal, simple as that.

Qualcomm also points out that DirectX 12 is also the first version to launch on Microsoft’s mobile operating systems at the same time as its desktop and console counterparts.

The company believes this emphasizes the growing shift and consumer demand for mobile gaming. However, it will also make it easier to port desktop and console games to mobile platforms.

Of course, this does not mean that we'll be able to play Titanfall on a Nokia Lumia, or that similarly demanding titles can be ported. However, it will speed up development and allow developers and publishers to recycle resources used in console and PC games. Since Windows Phone isn't exactly the biggest mobile platform out there, this might be very helpful and it might attract more developers.

We had a chance to see and feel the Adreno 420, Qualcomms latest GPU in action and as you can see from the video, the GPU and the Snapdragon 805 work pretty well.

The GPU is able to render hardware tessellation and can scale a complex terrain and detailed insect from 700 to 230000 polygons, making a real difference in the quality. You don’t need to tessellate in you are far away from an object of interest, but if you get closer, you can crank up the details.

Other demo we saw what the human face, fairly similar to the demo that Nvidia showed with Tegra K1 but our first impression is that Nvidia demo looks more lifelike.

Still Adreno 420 looks and fells fast and healthy and a support for OpenGL ES 3.1 might make a difference. Nvidia has OpenGL 4.4 support making it advantageous over the competition. The chap we talked to at Qualcomm has shared that they believe that Open GL ES is more power efficient and that they can stay in the thermal envelope that is required for phones.

The actual products will be announced later, but Qualcomm has its developer tablets up and running and many customers are testing the Snapdragon 805 silicon as we speak. We expect to see many designs win of it.

Qualcomm has unveiled its newest Snapdragon 805 chipset, an upgraded Snapdragon 800 chipset which features an Krait 450 quad-core CPU part as well as the brand new Adreno 420 GPU.

The Snapdragon 805 chipset features a quad-core CPU that will be based on the new and improved Krait 450 architecture. It can clock up to 2.5GHz and features memory bandwidth of 25.6GB/s. Of course, it is still a 32-bit processor so it looks like we will still wait a bit longer for Qualcomm to hop on the 64-bit train, currently exclusively held by Apple.

In addition to an improved CPU, the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 chipset also features a completely new Adreno 420 GPU which, according to Qualcomm, has 40 percent more processing power when compared to the Adreno 330. It has 4K display support as well as 4K video recording support, already seen on the Snapdragon 800 chipset.

Qualcomm also included a new Gobi 9x35 modem, which is based on a 20nm manufacturing process so it should be smaller, more power efficient and faster. It packs LTE Cat4 support, dual-band 802.11ac WiFi and features support for 4K video streaming via WiFi. It also packs a new dedicated camera processor, which should increase camera speed, provide much better image quality and has a gyro sensor for additional stabilization.

According to Qualcomm, the chip is ready for mass production and first devices are expected in the first half of the next year. We are quite sure that we will see some devices at CES in January next year as well as Mobile World Congress in February.

We have mentioned that Vivante, a relatively new mobile GPU IP provider, grew its market share from 0.3 percent last year to 9.8 percent in the first half of 2013. When we say mobile here we mean tablets and phones and you can check out the original story here.

Vivante had several important design wins with Google Chromecast, Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 as well as Huawei’s Ascend P6 mobile phone. Vivante IP found its place several interesting products, but more importantly the company’s future roadmap looks good.

A GPU called GC6400, based on new Vega core, comes with 16 shares, 533 million triangles a second and up to 8 Gigapixels a second and 128Gigaflops. All this gets placed in 16.4 square millimetres using the 28 nanometre High Performance process. Is shows quite good performance for its 800MHz clock and 1GHz shader clock.

The rest of specification includes support for Android 4.0 to 4.4 and beyond, Windows 8 RT and Windows Phone, OpenGL ES 3.0 and below, DirectX11 with 9.3 subset, along with Shader model 3.0 and Open CL 1.2 and draft 2.0. It also supports desktop Open GL version 3.x and 2.x, WebGL and render filter script.

Vivante’s GC6400 GPU should end up significantly faster than Nvidia’s Tegra 4. The numbers that we saw for Tegra 4 are as follows: in GL Benchmark 2.7 Nvidia’s Shield console scores 21 FPS, in HP’s Slatebook 10 X2 (Tegra 4, passively cooled) scores 17 FPS while the Vivante GC6400 scores 30 FPS in the same test. Adreno 330 from Qualcomm scores 26 FPS in the same test, while ARM’s Mali T628 GPU scores 24 FPS. Vivante is clearly the fastest of the lot.

In GL Benchmark 2.5 Shield Tegra 4 scores 56 FPS, HP Slatebook 10 X2 scores 50 FPS while GC6400 from Vivante scores 70. Adreno 330 scores 58 FPS while Mali T628 MP8 scores 72 FPS in the same test. Mali 628 MP8 wins by a small margin, but this still shows that Vivante is an upcoming player in the IP GPU market.

We know that Nvidia will soon introduce a significantly faster Kepler based graphics in the Tegra 5, but at the same time this leaves Vivante plenty of room to become a graphics runner up that can make a big difference in the market. Getting the Cromecast deal that will result in millions of shipped chips is a romantic Silicon Valley success story.

Imagination Technologies, the producer of PowerVR GPUs used in heaps of SoC designs, is still the world’s leading supplier of mobile GPUs, according to Jon Peddie Research. Imagination took the lead when it started providing GPUs for Apple and it never looked back. The new Apple A7 SoC is the first chip to use the company’s new Rogue 6-series GPU and it won’t be the last.

However, Imagination has lost a bit of ground since last year. Its market share in the first half of 2012 was a whopping 52 percent, but a year later it was down to 37.6 percent. Things should improve for Imagination as more Rogue designs appear.

As a result or Imagination’s dip, Qualcomm and ARM muscled in to seize more share over the last year. Qualcomm’s GPU share went up from 29.3 to 32.3 percent, while ARM saw an even bigger gain – going from 13.5 to 18.4 percent in the same period.

Nvidia was the biggest loser. Its share dropped from 4.9 percent to just 1.4 percent over the last year. Since Nvidia doesn’t license its GPUs, the number indicates a steep shipment in Tegra SoCs, which comes as no surprise.

The biggest winner, however, was not ARM or Qualcomm. It was Vivante, which had an 0.3 share last year, but ended the first half of 2013 with a 9.8 share. Vivante IP is used in a growing number of SoCs, but the company doesn’t get much coverage as most of its clients are focused at non-consumerish, embedded markets

Vivante currently provides GPU tech for Marvell, Freescale, Rockchip and Vivante's latest consumer design win we can think of is Google’s Chromecast, which packs a Marvell DE3005 SoC and Vivante GC1000 graphics. You can check out a list of Vivante's design wins here.

What’s in store for the second half of the year and beyond?

We believe Imagination will rebound with Rogue and Nvidia has a chance to make up some lost ground as more T4/T4i designs emerge. However, when Nvidia starts licensing Maxwell IP to other SoC builders, it could gain share overnight. Furthermore, if that triggers a response from AMD we could see the old green-red rivalry extend to the mobile space and who wouldn't want to see that happen? (Imagination, ARM, Qualcomm, Vivante. Ed)

Also, here’s an interesting statistic. The market for SoCs with GPUs grew 81 percent from the first half of 2011.

At least 50 designs wins for a combination of Snapdragon 600 and the soon to launch Snapdragon 800 are currently in the pipeline. This was confirmed by Tim McDonough Vice President, Marketing at Qualcomm in a recent conversation with Fudzilla.

Some devices, such as the HTC One, are starting to ship as we speak and the Samsung Galaxy S4 is coming soon. Both should enjoy strong sales, but this is just the start. The only Snapdragon 800 phone announced so far is the ZTE Grand Memo and Tim told us that more devices are on the way. He calls them design which means that not only phones will be powered by these chips. We are expecting convertibles, tablets even TVs. The number 50 is quite nice for a super high end chip, and you can imagine that Qualcomm will sell even more Snapdragon 400, 200 and even a great deal of last year's Snapdragon S4 chips.

The Snapdragon 800 has great camera capabilities and can easily record and play 4K Video, Ultra HD 3840 × 2160 pixels, something that might be interesting for future proof next generation devices. Snapdragon 800 comes in the second part of the year but we also heard we should learn more about it this Summer.

We are quite sure that there will be some Snapdragon 800 phones and tablets (convertibles) in time for back to school period which happens mid-summer in the northern hemisphere. That should be winter time for Australia.

HTC has announced yet another addition to its "affordable Android" smartphone lineup, the HTC Explorer. Based on the same Qualcomm chipset as the HTC Wildfire S, this 3.2-incher should be even more affordable due to its tuned down specs.

The Explorer is pretty compact with 102.8x57.2x12.9mm dimensions and features a 3.2-inch 320x480 screen. As noted, the hardware is exactly the same as the one found in the HTC Wildfire S, so it features Qualcomm's MSM7227 chipset with 600MHz Scorpion CPU and Adreno 200 GPU. The rest of the specs include 512MB of RAM, 90MB of internal storage and microSD card slot, 802.11bgn WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0 and A-GPS. It also features a 3.15 MP back camera with autofocus.

The new HTC Explorer smartphone is running Android 2.3.5 OS backed by HTC's own Sense 3.5 UI. It comes with a 1230mAh battery and will be available in Active Black and Metallic Blue color choices. The HTC Explorer should appear in retail in October with a suggested retail price of €199 in Europe.

Apple rules the tablet market, or should we call it the iPad market, and the rest of the ARM community are struggling to get some crumbs. It comes down to three other key players Qualcomm with Snapdragon, Texas Instruments with OMAP processors and Nvidia with Tegra.

Qualcomm acquired ATI's mobile phone graphics and renamed it to Adreno, but we are hearing that Adreno is stuck with DirectX 9 and won’t evolve much further as Qualcomm just didn’t continue development and implementation of future API's. Texas Instruments uses PowerVR graphics that continue to develop towards DirectX 11 and it is quite obvious that Nvidia has a DirectX 11 core for x86 graphics and that it will make a version for its Tegra processors.

Our sources are telling us that gaming is a big thing on iPads and other ARM tablets that leads us to assume that graphics part of the ARM based chips might play a big role in the future of non-Apple tablets. Qualcomm will have to do some soul searching to try to make up for current lack of DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 mobile graphics, but they are a big player and they can probably fix it within a few generations.

Whether you like it or not, the ARM revolution is happening today and these small chips are starting to matter to the world just as much as Intel and AMD chips do. They will get to many tablets and mobile phones in 2011 and onward and most of the 2011 models are dual-core.

We just mentioned the 1.5GHz OMAP 4440 chip yesterday and we got confirmation from a source close to Texas Instruments that this fancy fast chip can ship in the second half of 2011.

Texas (non-chainsaw) chaps do believe that that have a good case against Tegra 2 and that they can outperform it in certain cases with both 1GHz OMAP 4430 and OMAP 4440 at 1.5GHz.

TI will also fight well against Qualcomm MSM8x60 clocked at 1.2GHz dual-core and one thing that differentiates these three chips is the graphics. Nvidia has its own Geforce stuff, Qualcomm has Adreno renamed from ATI’s Imagion mobile graphics while Texas instruments relies on PowerVR for its graphics. Graphics and content will definitely play a big role in the future of mobile computing graphics.